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I’ve finished Henry’s mitts!

I used Knit Picks palette yarn in black, green, and blue. This yarn is an absolute dream for colorwork, and it blocked just beautifully. I was inspired by Eunny Jang’s lovely Endpaper Mitts. I used her thumb shaping and the purled seam stitch at each side, which makes a nice distraction to the eye at the point where the pattern jogs.

Here’s a quick outline of my pattern:

With blue, CO 48 (use a nice stretchy cast-on). Work 2×2 ribbing on size 0 needles for 30 rounds. K one round in blue, adding a p at each side for seam stitches (50 st).

Switch to size 2 needles.

The colorwork is just 2 blue, 2 black around twice, then 2 black, 2 green around twice, keeping purled seam stitch in black, but you also have to add a stitch in pattern on either side of ONE seam stitch every three rounds for the thumb gusset. (If you want a chart, leave a comment and I’ll write one up.)

When you’ve got 12 total extra stitches for the thumb, put those 12 plus the seam st on a length of yarn and CO one p st in black across the gap, and work for four more stripes. K one round blue, then work 5 rounds k1p1 ribbing, then work k1, sl1wyif around, then sl1wyib, p1 around, then work a kitchener bind-off.

Put the 13 thumb st on two needles and pick up 5 more across the gap, then work ribbing same as for hand.

Henry loves them and wore them all day today :)

They fit me as well as they fit Henry:

As I was knitting the second Endpaper Mitt, it seemed as if it might be slightly bigger than the first, but not by much. So I finished it anyway and dampened it tonight to block it into shape… and as I was patting it into shape next to mitt number one I discovered that it was a full two inches longer, as well as considerably wider. Same yarn, same needles, same number of stitches and repeats. Guess I was just more relaxed. Great. So, I ripped it out and will commence re-knitting tomorrow. Sigh. Couldn’t knit with wet yarn anyway tonight so I started a pair of mitts for Henry, not that he’ll ever wear them, but he wants them and I have plenty of yarn :) Basic k2p2 cuffs on 48st, and I’ll do some colorwork or cabling on the hands.

We started BSG over again tonight, watched the first half of the pilot. There’s nothing else we really want to watch, anyway, not till House and Survivor and The Office start back up, and it’s fun noticing all the stuff we missed the first time through. We just about died when Doral showed up on Galactica! Anakin, I mean Lee, is such a whiner-baby.

On August 31, I started a pair of Eunny Jang’s Endpaper Mitts. I finished the first one on September 3rd, and only worked on them for an hour or two a day — they’re that quick and easy! Here’s the first one:

I used my new KnitPicks Essential Solid, which is a very nice yarn to work with. It took me a few tries to pick a color combination that I liked — tried brown/green and brown/orange but neither had quite enough contrast.

The pattern is well-written and easy to follow. I made the smallest size, which fits my palm perfectly, but my wrists are so thin that the wrist is baggy. So I might give these away and make them again with ribbed wrists and patterned palms, or fancier shaping.

Oh, also, I only worked two reps of the pattern for the wrist, instead of three, and I shortened the palm by about half a repeat.

I used my regular ultra-stretchy 2-needle, 2-strand cast on. Was watching BSG when I started them and didn’t want to learn a tubular cast-on :)

And I learned the trick of the two set-up rows for the kitchener bind-off! I always use kitchener bind-off with k1p1 rib, but I’d never worked the setup rows before (k1, sl1wyif around, then sl1wyib, p1 around). It lets the stitches line up properly and makes the result ever so much more elegant!

We watched the first two episodes of BSG season 3 last night, so of course I had anxiety dreams all night and woke up too early. Bah.

Here are some photos:

I turned the heels on both of the gray penny sock mods a couple of days ago:

Heel detail:

Also made ten more morsbags over the last few days. The eight green ones are from an old fitted queen-size sheet that Mom didn’t want, and the polka-dotted ones are some scarps that Margaret gave me:

The Penny Socks, take two, from the top. I cast on 70 st and worked the ribbing for four cable crosses. On the fifth cross, I converted the 2×2 ribbing to 5-st Coin Cables by k2tog in the middle of the cross, so it’s hidden:

Henry doing archery yesterday at Margaret’s:

Henry at the beach on Tuesday:

I turned the heel on one of the Penny Socks tonight. Ugh. Not a good heel for my foot. So I’ve ripped them out. I really loved the cable pattern, though, so I’ll probably start a top-down pair using those cables and a good Dutch heel :)

I realized that I have plenty of Brittany Birch needles size 0, so I decided to make the Penny Socks in parallel. I figured out how to do both cable crossings, regular and coin, without a cable needle!

Finished! I love these socks. They were extremely fun to knit, and the finished socks are beautiful. I loved the spiral rib pattern! It’s a four-row pattern, easy to memorize, and it’s also easy to tell which row comes next so you never never get confused. It made the knitting seem to speed along. The pattern is free, and very well written. highly recommended! Thanks, Nicole! Nine-to-Five Socks, by Nicole

Because of my skinny feet, I worked them on 60 stitches instead of 72 (ten spiral ribs instead of twelve). The heel was on 30 st, plus the m1 to make the pattern balance — such a nice touch! In order to make the heel turning work out, I started as follows:
k16, ssk, k1, turn
p4 (not 5!), p2tog, turn

And my heel ended up nicely centered. Took me forever to figure this out :)

More photos!

Having a nice at-home day today, ignoring the errands that need to be done and just hanging around the house, very relaxing. Henry and I played WoW for a long time (grinding in the Western Plaguelands) and now his anime-loving friend, Matthew, has come to play. They’re making Matthew a Mii :) we did the Wii firmware upgrade this morning, nothing thrilling but it’s nice that they keep making improvements.

Last night we went to Margaret’s house for an ensemble rehearsal. Henry got to play percussion and he loved it. He’d never been in the situation of playing music he was unfamiliar with and following a conductor. He did well, and I was proud
of the way he picked up the feel of each piece. They did a couple of Lord of the Rings pieces, a little celtic thing, In the Mood, and Kokomo. Henry really picked up on In the Mood and added nice little fills on the snare from time to time. We’re looking forward to the next rehearsal! I had a great time knitting and listening, and am ready to knit the toe of my second nine-to-five sock:

And here’s a bonus photo for you, Henry at Karate on Monday. That’s Cassidy behind him. Sorry about the Ultra-Grain! My battery was dying and I didn’t want to waste time fiddling with the settings:

After my marathon knitting sessions to finish the Ravenclaw Bag, I developed severe pain in my right wrist. This has happened before, and I knew it would clear up if I stayed off it, so to speak, so — no knitting and very little typing yesterday! It’s feeling fine today and I’ll try a little gentle knitting later. I’m working the heel of the second nine-to-five sock, so, if all goes well, I might even finish it this weekend.

Still recovering from this nasty virus, so I didn’t do much yesterday. Lay about and read, mostly, and coughed, and did some LibriVox work. Henry got a ride with a nice mom to and from the last session of afternoon Hogwarts Summer Camp, so I didn’t even have to go anywhere.

At one point in the afternoon I felt too tired even to read, so I *gasp* turned on the TV and looked around for something good. Watched someone hwking knives on QVC for a while, then found a channel called Ovation that was playing a live performance of a Bach Cantata and felt like I’d dropped into an alternate universe of good taste and culture. Watching/hearing the cantata led to a memorable dream last night:

I was in Germany with Dan, Henry, Susan, Jack, Chloe, and Bob. I think there was someone else in our party too, a tallish thinnish rugged-type. Steve McQueen, possibly. I have no idea how he got into my dream. There was some flooding, but we went to a cathedral to hear a choir performing Bach. The audience was led up to a gallery that ran around the edges way up high near the roof. We could hear the choir but not see them. Of course, my dream featured actual Bach choral music. The lights went out and everyone left, but I was left behind and had to try to feel my way in the dark, and I got lost up among the rafters on a little ramp. Dan and Henry came back and found me, and we made our way down to where the musicians were rehearsing. The flood waters were coming into the church in places but no one was worried. The choir was rehearsing The Magnificat at this point. Just before I woke up they were at the section with the amazing brass so I’ve got that in my head now, though only vaguely and I don’t seem to have The Magnificat in my iTunes so I can’t track it down but if I can find my CD later I’ll figure out which section it was.

To quote Radar O’Reilly: “Ahhhh, Bach.”

Recorded Fahrenheit 451 off the Ovation channel and watched it last night with Dan. Good movie, a little perplexing (we both read the book but long ago. I read it when I was about Henry’s age), and with commercials cut in about every ten minutes, smack in the middle of scenes, really jarring.

Now I’m cataloging Peter’s recording of The Natural History of Selborne. For our 2nd anniversary August documentation cleanup, I’ve promised to update the huge document full of guidelines and procedures for librivox coordinators… It’ll be quite a job and I suppose I should get started.

Update: here’s the pattern! HP House Fair Isle Pouch Bags

Last night I crocheted the edging and handle, and sewed in the lining. All done! Henry loves it:

Because I am completely unable to work any written pattern without changing it (though I really tried not to for this one!) I changed the edging slightly. I used single crochet to close the bottom and work up one side. (Single crochet encloses the edge, unlike the slip-stitch called for in the pattern.) Then I chained the strap, turned, worked back along the strap in half-double crochet, turned again, and worked back in half-double crochet along the other side of the chain.. Attached loose end of strap firmly to the other side, then worked down in single crochet and finished off at the last corner.

And to clarify what I learned about colorwork:

Be careful about your tension when carrying floats across the back! You want just enough slack to allow the stitches to achieve their proper position, but no more and no less. Too much tension, as we all know, will cause your finished knitting to draw up and pucker. What I learned here is that too little tension (too much slack) is just as bad, and causes loose, unformed stitches at color changes. I showed my loose-looking shield and bird edges to the yarn store lady and she suggested twisting the yarns around one another at the color changes, creating a sort of knot. This was bad advice. The knot does keep the stitches in shape, but the knot also forces a gap to appear at the color change. I gave up on this technique about half-way up the wing of the bird, and watched my tension very carefully, with much better results.

I’m not talking about catching long floats behind the knitting. That’s not necessary in this pattern because it’s lined. Also that has nothing to do with good-looking edges at color changes.

It’s lined with green linen, left over from Henry’s cloak. Thanks for the awesome pattern, Rosemary, and thanks for letting me be a test-knitter!

Finished knitting today and now it’s blocking in the sunshine. I used coated florist’s wire to hold the edges in shape. Not entirely happy with my colorwork — got bad bad bad advice from yarn store lady (twist yarns at color changes on the shield section), when all I really had to do was tighten up the tension on my floats a little bit. I stopped twisting and started being more careful about tension (too loose is as bad as too tight!) about halfway up the wing. Starts looking better there. Hope to get it completely finished tomorrow!

Feeling really rotten today, rough cough, stuffy head, bleah.

Last night I took my Ravenclaw Bag knitting project with me to the Rush concert, in case we overestimated the drive time and had to wait around in the parking lot for couple of hours or something. I just discovered that I left it in Dan’s car when we got home — so it’s in Encinitas now. I was planning to finish it this afternoon! Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Still a little bit sick, runny nose, slight sore throat. Bah! But I really don’t feel awful so that’s good.

I just got back from Common Threads with two more balls of yarn for the Ravenclaw bag. Was able to match dye lots, thank goodness! And the yarn store lady said I should have been twisting the yarns at color changes in the shield area, so I think I’ll rip back and re-do that part. [edit: this turned out to be VERY bad advice. Paying more attention to float tension is what I should have done] It won’t take THAT long and if it looks better in the end it’s worth it.

Ravelry member Quietish (Ravelry’s not public yet, so here’s her flickr page) has designed a spiffy little knitted Gryffindor bag:

She’s writing out charts for all four houses, and I volunteered to test-knit the Ravenclaw bag for her (Henry likes Ravenclaw best). On Thursday we drove down to the yarn store in Encinitas and found something that’s probably DK weight (Dalegarn Heilo and Dalegarn Tiur). They didn’t have both colors in one yarn so I’ll have to mix. Bought two 50-gram balls, blue and grey. I knitted steadily all day today and have reached row 54 of the 73-row chart, and can see that I’ll run out of yarn long before I finish. Grr. I think the yarn store is open tomorrow, which is good, but that means I have to drive all the way down there again and buy more yarn that isn’t quite the right kind of yarn and it makes me cross.

Well anyway here’s how the bag looked earlier today:

I’ve actually gotten up near the top of the shield by now.

I’m also feeling a bit insecure about my fair isle skillz. I’m perfectly comfortable with basic small repeating patterns, but the large solid areas have me a little bit worried. I’m leaving plenty of slack in the floats, but the edges of the bird shape look pretty wormy. I hope some tweaking and a good firm blocking will make everything look nice in the end.

Nose still running.

WoW guild event this morning — a triathalon: get a brand-new character to level 6; fish for ten Mud Snappers, then duel with other guildies. Lots of fun!

Henry and I finished making our morsbags today:

Nice, eh? Total cost: $11, plus part of a spool of thread and a fabric marker. We’re ready to give them away to friends and family, though I think we’ll keep one of each to augment our trunk-of-the-car canvas bag collection. I shop about twice a week, so I figure that each cloth bag I use keeps about 104 paper or plastic bags a year out of the environment. And I fill, oh, four to six bags per trip. The numbers are staggering.

Visit http://www.morsbags.com/html/ for more info and a simple pattern. Kristen’s really great non-verbal instructions here: http://www.mediatinker.com/

I didn’t get to sleep till around 3am, was woken up by noise at 6am, went back to sleep, sorta, and had dreams about being woken up, and then was woken up again by even more noise at 8am. Got Henry up, took him to karate, did errands, came home, put the food away, made breakfast for Henry, did housework, dealt with electricity problems — turned out to be a faulty outlet in the kitchen. A nice old man electrician came and fixed it for me.

This afternoon Henry and I watched the Rifftrax of The Fellowship. Funny stuff, and a pleasant way to pass a tired afternoon :)

Also finished my horrid string bag modification. I’d rather not show you a photo. Let’s just put it out of our minds. Oh all right, if you insist…

Looks pretty nice laid flat:

But wretched in use:

Henry thinks it’s nice, so I’ll give it to him for a laundry bag or something. Bleah.

It was cloudy and cold in the morning so we played some Wii sports, and then I worked on cataloging a big messy awful librivox project while the boys watched Modern Marvels (all about cheese!) but the sun came out later so the boys swam and swam and swam. After dinner Henry and I taught Fargo how to play Settlers of Catan. He caught on really fast and we all had a lot of fun. Henry said it reminded him of fun times in Montreal.

At night Dan and I watched the first episode of the first season of BSG and I started knitting a Judy Gibson string bag:

I spotted this cute pattern on Ravelry (sorry, still in beta but public soon!) yesterday, dug up my leftover Cascade Fixation, and whipped one up. I love it! I skipped the pocket. I don’t really need a pocket on my head, heheh.

Quick instructions:
use a STRETCHY yarn like Cascade Fixation. Cast on 15. Work in garter stitch, or use a simple lace pattern. I used a Gull Wing pattern as suggested by Ravelry user BethBlueRoom. I worked 22 reps of the lace pattern, then bound off as follows:

Put the cast-on edge behind the left-hand needle. With the right needle, knit the first stitch along with the first loop on the cast-on edge. Repeat with the second stitch, then lift the first newly-knitted stitch over the second. I figure this will be easier to undo than sewing if the band stretches out over time and needs to be shortened a bit.

So. I’m just about ready to rip out my bpt sweater and re-knit the lovely red Brown Sheep yarn into something better. I’d like to make the Perfect Sweater, of course, so I’m going to jot down some notes to keep things clear in my mind while I design it.

New sweater must be:

• top-down, all one piece. Maybe a new and different shaping, not just plain raglan. Will investigate options in Knitting from the Top
• cardigan, button-front
• somewhat coat-like (hip-length, not tight)
• not v-neck. Maybe crew, maybe shawl collar, maybe standing collar
• Not too plain, not too fancy. Maybe a little cabling, but not overboard (not aran, heheh)
• double-knit button bands and hems! No ribbing! Awesome tute here!
• Work increases into cables, somehow? (thanks, Kristin!)

I’m going to look through my Barbara Walker books for cabling inspiration. Maybe a nice panel down the back and either side of the front? I like those diamond-shaped cables with seed stitch in the middle of the diamonds… And of course, I still need to rip out the bpt and skein, wash, and ball the yarn before I can get started. Hmm, maybe I’ll finish my orange Monkey sock first :)